Despite the best efforts of the RIAA, MPAA, and others, citizens are still downloading just as much stuff. (Source: Audio Junkies)

"You hear that Mr. Anderson?... That is the sound of inevitability..."

In
May, the US Copyright Group's "pay or else" suit over
torrent downloads of the movie The
Hurt Locker slammed over
5,000 individuals. One might have expected that downloads
of the movie might have dropped.

However, they have actually
been going
quite strong; the film was downloaded 200,000 times in June, with
23 percent of the downloads coming from the U.S. Some observers
believe that the movie's producers may actually be content with the
illegal downloads. Despite losing millions of copies in sales,
its likely still logging IP addresses and will be able to recoup
millions in threat payouts. For that reason, the film's
producers have made no effort to remove the film from popular torrent
sites.

Elsewhere, torrent sites are clearly
being targeted for takedown. Following the escape to overseas
hosting in 2005 in the wake of
the LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents suits,
torrent hosters have offered up open defiance to anything media
watchdog groups like the MPAA and RIAA can throw at them.

However,
torrent downloads are actually continuing to increase, with the
efforts against them seemingly having little effect, either on the
downloads or the sites that host them.

The
Pirate Bay,
perhaps the best known site, is still very much in action and,
according to some sources, turning a small profit. Threats,
police raids, civil actions, ISP-ordered
takedowns, and even sentencing
the Swedish admins that ran the site to jail time ultimately
has offered no relief to the media industry. The site still is
up and running complete with copyrighted material.

Similarly,
market-leading Usenet indexer Newzbin –
after its recent
defeat in Netherlands court over free-speech regarding
piracy – is right back in the gray. After a brief takedown,
the site has returned to the same URL, with dozens of movie listings
being added daily. The site's admins, who have invested over
$40,000 USD in the site, even brazenly boasted about plans
to profit off of it.

That kind of sentiment seen
by The
Pirate Bay and Newzbin increasingly
seems the sentiment in the pirate community. And the public
seems to be becoming increasingly brazen in their piracy as
well.

Frustrated media watchdog groups are generally turning
to two solutions. Either to craft mass threat schemes like The
Hurt Locker's
or spend money lobbying the government for harsher punishments.
Both solutions are problematic for the industry groups. The
problem with settlement schemes is that law firms demand a big cut
(in The
Hurt Locker case,
reportedly 70
percent of the settlements). And the legislative effort is
no better as it risk mass public outrage, if efforts such as
the jailing
of filesharers or repeal of free speech about piracy are
passed.